In the field of software development, newly developed software components need to be tested on various hardware configurations before becoming generally available. Given the expense associated with purchasing and maintaining hardware for purposes of testing software components, prior art systems and methods exist for simulating a computing component for purposes of testing a software component. Such simulators, however, require a software development team to re-implement the application programming interfaces (API's)s and/or protocols used by the computing component to be simulated, which is time consuming and expensive. These APIs and/or protocols are then built so that they can return a known set of data to a calling software component that is being tested.
Additionally, prior art systems and methods allow for the capture and replay of network packet information sent by a software component to a computing component and received by the software component from the computing component. Such known “capture and replay” systems and methods, however, allow for replaying only the exact network packet sequence that was captured and does not permit asynchronous API access based on the captured network packet information. What is needed, therefore, is a system and method for simulating a computing component, such as a computing component of a converged infrastructure, for purposes of testing a software component that overcomes one or more of the disadvantages associated with known systems and method for doing so.